"jamie olivers food revolution" news and stories

The rough ride continues in Food Revolution episode two: Jamie Oliver has opened one of his cooking centers in town (free for the locals) and humbly invites members of the Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD) -- which still won't let him into a single school -- to stop by. Blank stares say that's not happening. "I haven't even got a glimmer of hope," he says. "Which means, it's war."

In this war, Jamie's army might be confused with the Fruit-of-the-Loom brigade. Donning a tomato costume, Jamie enlists parent volunteers -- outfitted in banana, strawberry and carrot -- and roams the school-bound streets with free food, t-shirts (that read "Feed Me Better" and "Let Jamie In") and flyers to get parents to contact the LAUSD themselves. Then, natch, the community firestorm begins: "We're teaching our kids to be diabetic, when we train them to eat pizza," one mother in her strawberry war garb tells Jamie. And more than 745 parents send emails to the board, including a particularly powerful one: "I urge you to search your conscious. If you have nothing to hide, then let him in."

Suddenly, Jamie gets an email from a school that offers him a giant loophole. The West Adams Preparatory High School, under a special MLA partnership with LAUSD, has some freedom to build its own curriculum and function atypically -- but to a limit, Jamie finds. The school admits its staff is risking their jobs by letting Jamie in, and are aren't allowed to give him access to the cafeteria, but he is given a room to hold cooking classes. "We need him here," says Chief Executive Officer Mike McGalliod, who was impressed with the Revolution's first season.

"Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" has hit a major snag in Tinseltown. After an enthusiastic start, Oliver has been banned from filming in the classrooms of the country's second-largest school district.

School officials say they've seen the show and don't want any bad publicity. "If you look at the last series [Oliver] did in Huntington, W.Va., it was full of conflict and drama, and we're not interested in that," says Robert Alaniz, a spokesman for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), reports the Los Angeles Times. (Guess they missed the heart-swelling finale.) While they assess what to do next, officials have suspended his license to film in the city's schools.

The flashing cameras, beefy security guards and gawking bystanders give it away: Jamie Oliver and his food revolution have landed in Los Angeles. Clad in a scruffy blue flannel shirt and electric-green sneakers, Oliver wasted no time yesterday telling visitors to his new Community Kitchen space in L.A.'s Westwood neighborhood that he wants Angelinos to eat better. Yet he's the first to admit he's up against major challenges. (See my post from Tuesday for more on Jamie's mission.)

The truth is, Oliver says, he doesn't yet know how he'll go about changing things in LA, or even whether he'll succeed. "I'm just one fella, and I'm only human," he says, cracking a wide grin. The new kitchen space is impressive, which isn't surprising, since it will also function as a television set for the next three months. It has a large demonstration kitchen, an eating nook, small cooktops for cooking lessons, even an area filled with baskets of colorful fresh produce. ("People who don't buy this stuff don't know what to do with it," he says.)

But he'll need more than a nice facility to make a meaningful change in a city this large. Last year, Oliver made a splash in the town of Huntington, West Virginia, (population 49,129) -- but L.A. has almost 4 million residents, and the chasm between ethnicities and wealth here only add to the difficulty. He says he chose Los Angeles exactly for these reasons. "There's incredible diversity here," he says. "Rich and very poor. Poverty and the need for help is within a couple of miles from anywhere, no matter how rich the district."

Skinny starlets, buff surfers, frolicking beachgoers -- on the surface, Los Angeles might not appear to be a logical choice for a health makeover. After all, this is a salads-and-sushi town. But as Jamie Oliver knows, much of Tinseltown's population is more familiar with the city's donut shops, taco trucks, and hamburger joints than its dainty spa cuisine. Oliver, a self-appointed guardian of America's health, intends to put an end to the overindulgence. Tomorrow, he's opening a new community kitchen for the second season of "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" in Los Angeles's tony Westwood neighborhood. The outpost, called Jamie's Kitchen, is where he'll show Angelenos how to cook his way. (All while cameras are rolling, natch.)

Truth is, it used to be easy to pick on Jamie Oliver. After all, this was a guy who hosted a show called "The Naked Chef." But Oliver has morphed from a slightly goofy twentysomething television star into an international food mogul with a tireless enthusiasm for do-gooder projects both here in America and across the pond. Last year, he set up camp in Huntington, West Virginia and tried to convince the locals to ditch processed food and learn to cook. The show, which featured tearful confessionals from overweight teens as well as altercations between newly motivated residents and those who clung to their deep fryers, won an Emmy, and Oliver is back for season two.

Watch out, Los Angeles school officials! You may become next season's prime-time TV villains.

Jamie Oliver, the English chef who won an Emmy for his show "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" (which portrayed some school-lunch bureaucrats in West Virginia as ensuring that children are given meals sure to make them obese and short-lived), is bringing the show to L.A. for season 2.

When producers wrote to officials at the Los Angeles Unified School District, asking for permission to film in the schools, it was denied.

"Our feeling was that his time would be better spent or invested in other communities," an L.A. school official told the Los Angeles Times.

In part two of Oliver's exclusive three-part interview with Slashfood, he lays down a warning to the district.